374 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES
❖❖❖Humans making meaning out of the meaning-making of other humans: Translated plainly from
the philosophical tongue of ontology and epistemology, this is the heart of what it means to be an
interpretivist. And in this very basic sense, we are all interpretivists, from our beginning in the
world as newborn infants turning toward the familiar voice and the well-known smell to the
attempt in our dying days to make sense of our lives, to tell a story about what it has meant that we
too once walked the earth. Perhaps nothing so starkly reveals the centrality of meaning making to
the human condition than those tragic instances in which projects of meaning making appear to
break down: the toddler diagnosed with autism, unable to decipher the profound mystery of
another’s laughter, of an embrace, of a kiss. Or the bewilderment in the eyes of someone with
Alzheimer’s as once familiar landmarks and toeholds of the mind crumble and yield one by one to
a terrifying deconstruction that knows no reconstruction.
Indeed, shared meaning making is so central to our lives in common that we purge as “the
mad” those who too energetically rebel, whether by choice or otherwise, against those meanings
that we have come to call facts. Nor is the sphere of meaning making constricted only to humans’
relationships with other humans. As Wislawa Szymborska reminds us in “View with a Grain of
Sand”:^1We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.